Obama proposes $1 billion climate protection fund

February 15, 2014

US President Barack Obama (2nd L) tours a farm in Los Banos, California, on February 14, 2014

President Barack Obama proposed a $1 billion fund to mitigate the impact of climate change in the United States, and unveiled financing to combat drought parching swathes of California.

The president landed in the Central Valley area and met farmers who have lost livestock and seen once fertile lands wither through lack of water.

"The budget that I send to Congress next month will include $1 billion in new funding for new technologies to help communities prepare for a changing climate," Obama said on Friday.

The president also noted that the snowpack in California mountains—which he overflew in Air Force One was less extensive than normal—compounding water scarcity.

"As anybody in this state could tell you, California's living through some of its driest years in a century. Right now, almost 99 percent of California is drier than normal," Obama said.

It is unclear whether the fund has much prospect of advancing past Republicans on Capitol Hill, where skepticism of the science of global warming and Obama's wider political agenda runs deep.

White House spokesman Jay Carney argued earlier that climate change was already having a demonstrable impact on the American climate.

"We've always had heatwaves, but now the worst ones are longer, and they're hotter," Carney said.

US President Barack Obama (2nd L) talks to Rep. Jim Costa while walking to Air Force One, at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland, February 14, 2014

"We've always had droughts, but the worst ones are getting longer and drier.

"We've always had severe storms, but instead of 100-year storms that happen once in a hundred years, we're having 100-year storms that happen every other year or every five years."

The new Climate Resilience Fund is intended to finance research into better understanding of projected impacts of climate change and how to better protect communities and infrastructure.

It is also designed to help vulnerable communities plan and prepare for the impacts of climate change and to encourage local measures to reduce future risk and to fund new resilient technologies and infrastructure to combat a warming climate.

The drought emergency has sparked wildfires and prompted Governor Jerry Brown to ask Californians to cut their water use by 20 percent.

California is supposed to be the Golden State. Make that golden brown. The entire west coast of the United States is changing color as the deepest drought in more than a century unfolds. According to the US Dept. of Agriculture ...

As 2013 came to a close, the media dutifully reported that the year had been the driest in California since records began to be kept in the 1840s. UC Berkeley paleoclimatologist B. Lynn Ingram didn't think the news stories ...

Power plants across the country are at increased risk of temporary shutdown and reduced power generation as temperatures and sea levels continue to rise and water becomes less available, the Department of Energy said Thursday.

Chemical products that contain compounds refined from petroleum, like household cleaners, pesticides, paints and perfumes, now rival motor vehicle emissions as the top source of urban air pollution, according to a surprising ...

Climatologists are often asked, "Is climate change making hurricanes stronger?" but they can't give a definitive answer because the global hurricane record only goes back to the dawn of the satellite era. But now, an intersection ...

Carbon emissions from the Brazilian Amazon are increasingly dominated by forest fires during extreme droughts rather than by emissions from fires directly associated with the deforestation process, according to a study in ...

Upwelling in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean provides essential nutrients for the region's microscopic plants, but iron – a key ingredient that facilitates nitrogen consumption – is in short supply. To compensate, ...

The added weight, electricity demand and aerodynamic drag of the sensors and computers used in autonomous vehicles are significant contributors to their lifetime energy use and greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new ...

It is reassuring that people are talking about solutions, and getting past the politics. Science and industry are way past the point of arguing, they are taking action. Getting past the do nothing stage, is apparent in Pluvinergy consideration. As more people read about it and learn of its potential, the concept is beginning to get some traction. Hopefully, larger scale prototypes will soon be demonstrated, so that a full scale system can show that indeed we can control the CO2 that we put into the air, and the correct the climate experiment that is rapidly unfolding. It is great that a Democratic President supports and Democratic Governor; but the work President Obama did with the Republican Governor of NJ is even better news. We have to work together to solve what may be the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We are all Americans, and we must face this potential catastrophe together.